The possibility to perform measurement tasks and experiments on complex telelaboratory structures is gaining momentum as a relevant aspect in a number of areas, from scientific and technological research, to environmental monitoring, to distance learning and training.

Grid architectures, viewed as tools for the integration of distributed resources, play a significant role, not only as managers of computational resources, but increasingly as aggregators of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. In this context, the functionality of a grid architecture allows managing, maintaining and exploiting heterogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unified way, by providing standardized interfaces and common work environments to their users. This is achieved through the properties of isolation from the physical network and from the peculiarities of the instrumentation, granted by standard middleware, together with secure and flexible mechanisms to seek, access, and aggregate distributed resources.

The 1st Workshop in this series was held in Sorrento, Italy, in July 2005, within the framework of the International Tyrrhenian Workshop on Digital Communications. It was devoted to the investigation of the main issues related to the sustainable realization of telelaboratories, where real and virtual instrumentation can be shared and used in a collaborative environment. The second workshop was held in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, in April 2006.

The current edition of the Workshop focuses on all aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation on the Grid. These include middleware architecture, high-speed networking in support of Grid applications, wireless Grid for acquisition devices and sensor networks, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for real-time control, measurement instrumentation and methodology.